Comedian spent MLK Jr. Day tweeting love at his haters

When most people get racist messages on Twitter, they either a) ignore them or b) try to come up with a snarky, withering, devastatingly clever burn to put the bigot in his place.

Solomon Georgio took another tack. Earlier this week on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, he decided to fight Twitter racists with a simple weapon: love.

While that might sound a tad reductive, that’s exactly what Georgio, an L.A.-based comedian, did. He spent Martin Luther King, Jr. Day searching for racist tweets, responding to each tweeter with a message of patience, compassion, and love:

For MLK day, I will now search for maliciously racist tweets & tell the author that I love them.

Of course, Georgio is right, to a degree, and saying “I love you” to racist trolls on Twitter isn’t necessarily a better defense than ignoring them or calling them out on their shit. It’s also not easy to imagine this level of civility being achieved IRL — I doubt Georgio and any of these Twitter trolls will move in and start picking out curtains together anytime soon (though if they did, I smell a sitcom).

But it’s nice to imagine a world where one could simply fight hatred with love, as elegantly and effectively as Georgio did here, and it’s certainly a lovely way to honor MLK’s memory.